


And You Have To Be

by constellationqueen



Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Andrew never made it pro, Andrew really wants to kill Neil, Hate at First Sight, M/M, Mentions of Rape, Neil played for the Ravens, Past Child Abuse, and now he's a coach, and now he's an assassin, but neither of those should be surprising, considering this is andrew and neil, i don't know what to tag this tbh, it's just kinda this weird thing, it's not as crazy as it sounds, too bad he can't
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 03:42:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6549157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/constellationqueen/pseuds/constellationqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the angsty soulmate au that i'm sure no one except <a href="http://wymack.tumblr.com/">Taylor</a> and <a href="http://ziegenkind.tumblr.com/">Sarah</a> wanted</p><p>also big thanks to Taylor for helping me with the plot. never would have been able to start this if it wasn't for her</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keep in mind that this is the prologue, and next chapter is going to stretch back in time to the real meat of the story. Right now, though, I'll give you a glimpse of the happy ending and then we can start in on the shit storm next chapter lmao.

There’s a cat winding between Andrew’s feet as he makes coffee, pulling two mugs down from the cabinet. One is black, the other green with a yellow design of a wedge of cheese. In the black one, Andrew dumps a significant amount of French Vanilla creamer, and in the other he puts just a light sprinkling of sugar. Andrew adds the coffee in once it’s brewed.

Down the hall, the shower shuts off, and the cat leaves Andrew in favor of trotting back to sit in front of the door and trip Neil as he walks out. Eventually Neil will learn to watch where he steps, but for now the reality of having a cat at his feet is too new for him to remember to look down.

Andrew grabs his mug and heads for the balcony. It’s raining, but only just. Spring is in the air, but there’s still snow littering the ground, mocking Andrew from three stories down.

Morning cigarettes are the best, the harsh bite of Neil’s preferred brand scraping down his throat, only to be drowned by sweet coffee. Off in the distance, a horn blares, sirens scream. But everything in Andrew’s mind is quiet. It hasn’t been this quiet in a long time. Even after his old connection with Neil dropped, even after his brain became his own space again, it was always so loud.

Neil makes it quiet.

Andrew takes a slow drag of his cigarette as Neil, bundled up in a green sweatshirt, joins him on the balcony. Neil takes a glance at Andrew’s bare torso and loose sweatpants and says that he hopes Andrew doesn’t catch a cold.

“It’s spring,” Andrew says, handing over the pack of cigarettes.

“The weather doesn’t seem to agree with you.”

Andrew flicks ashes over the railing and glares out at the snow-covered parking lot, the bare trees rattling in the north wind. Spring officially started well over a week ago. “The weather needs to get it’s shit together.”

Neil chuckles, shuffling over to crowd up against Andrew’s side. “We’ve got another month of this,” he says, and Andrew shivers both at the low cast of Neil’s early morning voice, and at the chill starting to seep into his bones. “One of the backliners… Davidson. He and I were talking and complaining about the weather. He says it doesn’t start to shape up until close to May or later.”

A sip of coffee does nothing to warm Andrew past his chest. “Remind me why we moved here again.” He takes a last drag and drops the butt into their collection bucket.

“That’s on you,” Neil says, shifting around as Andrew makes to head back inside, leaving Neil to finish his cigarette alone.

Goosebumps raised over his arms, Andrew makes for the bedroom and dons a sweatshirt and socks before he returns to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. He leaves the sugar on the counter when he hears the balcony door slide shut.

Neil predictably makes his second cup with a little more sugar than the first, and Andrew moves around him while he starts on breakfast. When Andrew is washing his hands, Neil comes up behind him, and Andrew hisses at the cold fingers against his stomach.

“Omelets?” Neil asks, words mumbled into Andrew’s shoulder.

“We just had omelets two days ago.”

Neil shrugs and wraps his arms entirely around Andrew’s waist. “I’m just really in the mood for omelets.”

Andrew sighs, leaning back against Neil to let the other man hold his weight. Neil grunts something about Andrew being heavy, but Andrew slaps Neil’s arm and otherwise ignores the comment. They both lapse into silence, and Andrew is content enough to close his eyes.

It wasn’t always like this.


	2. Chapter 2

Several poor decisions led up to this catastrophic moment, and Andrew can’t believe that he was too blind to see them.

For starters, all of the moments when he felt pain or fear that wasn’t his own, that coincided to the life of the man in front of him. The white-hot grinding pain that had Andrew on his knees after a match, ankle feeling broken, worse than broken – on the same day that Neil Josten was admitted to the hospital on account of an ankle injury that would end his Exy career.

Andrew remembers that day only as the day he had to babysit Kevin more than usual, give him alcohol but keep an eye on him, keep him from doing something stupid, pull him out of panic attacks.

I knew he’d do it, Kevin said. It was only a matter of time.

Missing that connection was a stupid mistake on Andrew’s part.

Then there were more recent events. Being rejected by the professional circuit, turning to a life of violence instead, because violence is all Andrew knows. Taking this job in particular, a poor decision made in a desperate grab of six million dollars. There was the misstep of not looking into exactly who he was making the deal with, the mistake of coming down here with the intent of spending a week gathering information before killing Neil Josten.

And so far the biggest mistake of all: shaking Neil’s hand.

Andrew’s connection is gone. Not just silent, the way it sometimes got when he wasn’t being fed emotions or sensations through his soulmate, but _gone_.

Fuck.

_Fuck._

Fucking shit – fuck – no – _this was not part of the plan._

After sixteen years of being connected to someone who experienced just as much pain and heartbreak as Andrew had, after sixteen years of being woken up in the middle of the night by panicked thoughts and flashes of terror and pain, after sixteen years of trying to avoid touching anyone and everyone in the hopes of never meeting this broken person the universe wanted him to be with, Andrew ends up here, in this office, holding the hand of an ex-rival, with his soulmate connection gone.

Gone.

Neil Josten is Andrew’s soulmate.

Neil looks ready to run.

Andrew recoils from Neil’s grip like he was burned, and indeed the skin of his hand is hot and tingling. Andrew clenches it in hopes of suffocating the flame.

“You…” Neil’s voice is tight and uncertain.

“No.” Andrew lifts his eyes and glares at Neil. “No,” he says again, not in denial that this is happening, because _this is happening_ , but to avoid talking about it.

They stare at each other in silence, Andrew ready to kill someone, Neil looking like a rabbit, pulse jumping in his throat. The assistant coach contract that Andrew just signed is sitting forgotten between them.

Andrew can’t just sit here anymore. “What time do I need to be here in the morning.” It isn’t a question – just a means to an end. He knows that he doesn’t have to keep doing this, he doesn’t have to play the role he came here playing. He _can’t_ , because Neil’s death would mean Andrew’s own death.

But he can’t process that fast. Not when he feels… whatever this is.

“Six,” Neil says, and Andrew can see Neil’s flight response die just enough for Neil to pick up the contract and hand it to Andrew. “Drop this off with Peggy on your way out.”

Andrew snatches the contract and is gone, slamming the door to Neil’s office behind him.

Margaret Kinder smiles up at him when he hands over the contract. “Went with the probationary deal, I see,” she remarks, taking the papers in one of her manicured hands.

Andrew knows that she gets her manicures done at the same place on alternating Tuesdays. He knows that she drinks green tea, and never coffee. He knows that she was married to a man named Richard and then divorced him five years ago. He knows that she underwent her transition surgery a year later. He knows that she remarried to a woman named Alice and became the stepmother to young Jason two years ago. He knows her credit score, her high school addiction to cocaine, her occasional purchasing record of marijuana. Andrew knows just as much about Peggy as he knows about Neil.

All of this knowledge, wasted.

“Be here at six,” Peggy repeats Neil’s words, tucking the paperwork into a file. “We usually have coffee and donuts lying around if you’re hungry when you get here. Don’t –”

Andrew doesn’t stick around to hear her out.

He’s back in the sticky heat of southern Florida before a minute has passed. His car is already running, and he slips into the cool leather seat with easy familiarity. The engine purrs and then turns to a roar as Andrew throws it into gear and tears out of the parking lot.

The hotel he’s staying in is only a few blocks away, and Andrew parks in the rear of the lot before heading up to his room.

He is already calmer, more in control, but still he walks to the window and lights a cigarette.

“Fuck,” Andrew says, without much feeling. He can’t kill Neil. There goes the six million. He can’t just fucking leave, because he knows Neil’s history and how much of a target for murder he is. And if Andrew backs out of the deal, someone else will be hired, and the people looking to kill Neil may just say fuck it to the information and have Neil killed from a distance. Then Andrew would die too.

No, Andrew needs to stay, because he isn’t ready to die yet, and Neil has a better chance of surviving if Andrew sticks around.

He needs a new plan, and better information on who his anonymous employer is.

Andrew finishes his cigarette and stubs it out in an ashtray. While his computer is booting up and working through all of the layers of protection he has placed on it, Andrew thinks through everything he knows about his employer, anything to give him more information, anything more substantial to start from.

All he has to go off of is a lot of wealth and a lot of effort to keep hidden.

The computer finally logs in and Andrew starts digging through all of his communications with his employer. He plugs in his phone and back-traces the calls. He goes through the scant emails. He does personal digging outside of that.

Hours pass. Andrew moves the ashtray to the desk and smokes his way through the rest of his pack. It’s past midnight by the time he pulls on the string that unravels everything.

Andrew leans back in his chair, fingers itching to reach for a bottle of whisky that isn’t there. “Fuck,” he says, this time with feeling.

His employer is Ichirou Moriyama.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the last chapter of not-Neil-and-Andrew before we really get into it. i just really wanted to set up Andrew's character a bit better for you guys before we really started diving in to what's going to happen between Andrew and Neil. 
> 
> also, school is killing me right now, so i only have one chapter after this currently written, and i don't know when i'm going to have time to start writing again, so there's going to be some significant lagging in chapter uploads at least until school is over

Andrew leans his shoulders against the side of a corner building and watches a man and a woman down the street walk towards him. The sun is gone and the sky is overcast, but the sticky heat still drags sweat down the back of Andrew’s neck. The streetlights cast an amber hue to the sidewalk and the buildings around him. Andrew traces his eyes down the side street he’s standing in, eyes flicking to the loading dock of the store at the end of the street across from him. He looks up to the flat rooflines and follows them for a ways, trailing distances between the buildings and debating good vantage points.

The couple gets closer, and the woman stumbles in her heels. The man is walking unaffected, obviously stone-cold sober, but the it’s apparent that the woman is drunk or high or both.

Andrew knows it’s the latter. He was just watching them interacting at the bar.

The streets are empty. It’s just the three of them.

“Need a hand?” Andrew asks, eyes narrowing as the man – six foot two, close to one hundred seventy pounds, not very muscular – pulls to a halt and tightens his grip on the woman.

“What do you want, kid?” the man growls. The woman looks between the two men and presses her lips together. Then her eyes widen and she giggles.

If Andrew wasn’t so focused on the man, if he wasn’t so numb to the world around him, he may have flinched at the emotionless laughter. Instead he says, tone flat, “You look like you could use some help with her.”

“We’re fine. Go home, kid.” The man’s voice is sharp and final, and he begins to move away.

Andrew steps into his path and tips his head back to look up at the man. “I wasn’t asking.”

The man curls his lip and lets go of the woman, pushing her a little and letting her stumble away. He fists his hand to take a swing, but Andrew is faster. His knife sinks into the man’s upper thigh, twists, and drags back out. When the man stumbles, Andrew shoves him back. Momentum carries the larger man further down the side street, and gravity pulls him to the ground.

Andrew follows slowly, twirling the knife between his fingers as he skirts around the man, who is trying to get back to his feet. “You’re making a mess,” Andrew says, and he kicks the man’s ribs, watches him fall yet again. Bored of this, Andrew drags the man down the street, hyper-aware of the blood trail he’s leaving, and props the man against the side of the building, right next to the loading dock. Andrew waves his knife in front of the man’s face to get his attention. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that rape is bad?”

The man opens his mouth, either to say something in retort or to yell for help, but Andrew presses the edge of the knife to the man’s lips.

“No, no, no, don’t scream. You’ll wake the neighbors.” With an emotionless look and a bitter taste of disgust sitting in the back of his throat, Andrew cuts the man’s throat.

Thinking about _inconveniences_ , Andrew wipes off the blade and tucks it away into his armband.

Muttering about _brand new leather_ , Andrew peels off his gloves and shoves them into his pocket.

He finds the woman leaning against a streetlight back on the main road. She’s looking at Andrew with cloudy grey eyes and disheveled hair. Her dress is too nice for a town like this.

“Where’s…?” she trails off, frowning and holding her hand up to about the height of the man.

GHB is becoming more popular and easier to get than Rohypnol. It causes confusion, motor impairment, and amnesia. The first two are already evident, and Andrew is hoping that the third one pans out as well.

“He went back to the bar. He left me to take you home, okay?” Andrew reaches out a hand, palm up, silently asking for permission. After a moment spent looking around, presumably for the dead man, the woman takes Andrew’s hand. “Where do you live?” Andrew asks, tugging her closer and putting her arm around his shoulders so that he can support her better when he starts walking.

“Oh I’m… I’m not from here,” she responds, leaning heavily against Andrew for a moment before swaying the other way, pressing her side into the arm Andrew has around her waist.

“Are you staying with family? Or at a hotel?” Andrew is careful to speak slowly and gently so that she understands.

The woman stumbles, but Andrew absorbs it as he leads her to his car, a little more than a block away. “The, um…” The woman flaps her free hand and pulls her eyebrows together. “I don’t remember the name of it.”

Hotel, then. “That’s alright. We’ll find it.” He wonders briefly what she’s in town for, but dismisses it as inconsequential. She’s certainly not a danger to him.

It takes twice as long as it should have for Andrew and the woman to get to his car, but he eases her into the passenger seat and takes off her heels for good measure.

After he’s settled into the driver’s seat, Andrew takes the woman’s purse and digs around until he finds the hotel keycard. He knows where that is; he memorized a map of the city before he crossed into Florida.

“You have a really nice car,” the woman says, running her fingers over the door. “Where did you get it?”

“Georgia,” Andrew says, reaching over to turn the AC up.

They reach the hotel without incident, and Andrew parks and comes around the other side of his car to help the woman out. She tries to put her heels back on and fails. She tries to get out of the car by herself and fails. She tries to stay upright once Andrew gets her out of the passenger seat, and she fails at that too.

The drugs have just been in her system too long.

So Andrew shuffles her over and keeps a steadying hand on her shoulder while he grabs her heels and gives them to her – “Don’t let go of these, okay?” – and then he casually scoops her up and carries her into the building. Her weight is nothing, but the length of her body is more than a little awkward.

At least she’s holding onto her heels.

Andrew whistles at the front desk to get the night shift receptionist’s attention, and he apologizes softly when the pitch of the sound makes the woman in his arms flinch.

Thankfully the worker on duty is also a young woman.

“What happened to her?” The young blonde is immediately worried and around the counter.

Andrew shrugs. “Rough night at the bar. She’s in 117.”

The blonde hesitates a moment, staring at Andrew, before she ducks behind the front desk and returns with a master keycard. She takes off down the hall without another word, and she unlocks the door and holds it open for Andrew.

As carefully as possible, Andrew carries the woman through the door and lays her down on the bed. She’s already asleep. Sighing, because why does he have to do all of the work, he lifts the blankets and settles them over her.

“Tell her to keep a better eye on her drinks,” Andrew says as he passes the young receptionist, and he doesn’t stop walking all the way back to his car, no matter how many times she calls after him.

There’s a missed call on his phone that shows up on the Bluetooth screen on the Maserati’s dashboard. “For fuck’s sake.” It’s well after two in the morning; there’s only one person who could have called him.

Andrew presses the missed call notification and leans back in his seat while the phone dials.

“You missed your check-in time.” The voice is the same as all of the other anonymous calls he’s received from his employer. The only difference is that now he knows who is running things.

“I was busy,” Andrew says, closing his eyes and thinking about his problems, so many problems, all of his stupid fucking problems that suddenly start and end with Neil Josten.

“Working, I hope.”

“What do you want?”

“Oh, I just wanted to make sure that there weren’t any complications on your first day.”

Andrew’s fist clenches, but he releases the tension soon after. “No complications. Everything went fine. But it’s going to take me the whole week.”

“Oh? That sounds like _complications_ , Mr. Minyard.”

“He’s a pathological liar. And he’s caved in on himself to keep things protected. It’s going to take me at least a week to figure out how to pull out the information you want.”

There’s silence for a moment. “Don’t disappoint me, Mr. Minyard.”

Andrew hits his palm against the steering wheel as soon as the call disconnects.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all you are now at par with what i've written. i've lost momentum with this fic and i'm struggling to find my muse for it again. so you'll be updated from now on as i finish chapters.
> 
> no worries, i'm going to keep writing this, it's just going to be slow going

Andrew lets himself get body slammed against the wall of Neil’s office. He loses a bit of air in his lungs but holds onto his blank face, unimpressed and unsurprised by Neil’s sudden aggression. Andrew’s fingers itch to have a knife in them, but he resists the urge to pull a knife on Neil. That won’t get him anywhere. Especially with last night’s murder already on the news.

“Why are you here?” Neil demands, fists tight in Andrew’s shirt.

Andrew stares back, his own hands loose at his sides. “Your defense is shit.” It isn’t a lie. After watching them practice today, Andrew knows that the defensive line of Neil’s team is not good enough for the level they are playing at. The offense is carrying all of the weight. “Haven’t you taught them any of your fancy Raven drills?”

Neil slams Andrew against the wall again, and this time Andrew grunts, his shoulders complaining about the rough contact with the hard surface. “Stop avoiding the question,” Neil snarls. On the one hand, Andrew is intrigued by the anger, the way Neil’s violence sparks and ignites the fear in his eyes. Neil has every reason to be afraid.

But on the other hand, Neil’s quick lunge to violence is annoying and tiresome. “Oh, that’s right,” Andrew glances down to Neil’s feet and then back up again, “Riko broke your ankle.”

Neil releases Andrew as if he’s been burned. The violence in Neil’s striking blue eyes has been completely snuffed out. The fear is back, but there’s something else too. “No. Don’t say that.”

Andrew leans forward into Neil’s space. “Riko broke your ankle because you were getting more attention than him.” Andrew remembers that day only in relation to Kevin, but he remembers a press conference a week prior to Neil’s injury. He remembers Neil getting more questions and praise than Riko.

Neil gives another hard shove to Andrew’s shoulders, but this time Andrew doesn’t budge, just fixes Neil with a blank stare and watches Neil step away. “Riko did not break my ankle,” Neil says one last time, voice tight.

Bullshit, Andrew thinks. He can hear the lie on Neil’s tongue, but he doesn’t press it. They both know that Neil is lying. Riko broke Kevin’s hand for being better, why wouldn’t he take care of Neil the same way?

“Why…” Neil takes a deep breath, and Andrew watches the way Neil’s body rearranges, pulling himself back together again. He tries again: “Why are you here?”

Andrew’s first instinct is to keep lying. That’s what he was hired to do – lie through his teeth about anything and everything to get the information needed from Neil, and then, ultimately, to kill him.

But the rules are different now. Things, have changed, so Andrew doesn’t need to lie anymore.

“To kill you,” Andrew says, and Neil jerks backward, obviously not expecting that answer. “I was hired to get information from you and to kill you.”

Neil works his jaw as he stares at Andrew. His mouth parts and then closes. Andrew watches Neil’s eyes narrow before his mouth opens again, and this time words come out. “That’s the most elaborate form of self destruction I’ve ever seen.”

Andrew lifts a corner of his mouth. “So you’ve found my dilemma, then, in that killing you would kill me too. I’m not ready to die, so here we are.”

“Where does that leave us, then?” Neil asks, and Andrew hates how the word “us” hangs in the air between them, crawling down Andrew’s spine.

There is no us, Andrew thinks, because there can’t be, because Andrew can’t open himself up like that. Neil is so easy to lose.

“Well,” Andrew pulls out a chair and drops into it, “why don’t you sit down and shut up and let me spell it out for you.”

Neil shoots Andrew a bitter look, but he sits. Next to Andrew, not across the desk from him.

Andrew tells Neil everything, from the beginning. He tells Neil about being called on an unregistered number, the distorted voice on the other end offering him a job. He tells Neil about the six million dollars on Neil’s head, about the information Andrew is supposed to be after.

“Who hired you?” Neil asks, interrupting.

“Ichirou Moriyama,” Andrew responds. Neil’s face falls ashen. “Your turn,” Andrew says, facing Neil a little better. “What do you have on them?”

Neil doesn’t respond for a moment, and Andrew lets him be, watching for any indications of Neil bracing himself to run. He doesn’t see any signs that Neil wants to get away. He sees instead the soft edge of Neil’s jaw, the almost delicate curve of his throat. He sees Neil’s long eyelashes brush the tops of his cheeks. He sees Neil’s elegant hands clenched nervously in Neil’s lap. Andrew doesn’t want to see these things, but he sees them anyway.

“I found and stole a series of transactions tying the Moriyamas to my father. Or, well, tying my father to them, I guess,” Neil confesses, meeting Andrew’s eyes across the short distance between them. Andrew represses a shiver from the chill those blue irises send down his spine.

Andrew pushes a hand through his hair and lets out a sigh. He sags into his chair. Nathan Wesninski has been hunted by the FBI for years, and they never seem to get any closer to catching him. Neil is the only living person who can not only get Nathan behind bars, but now he can tear down the Moriyama empire as well.

“You just like making my life difficult, don’t you?” Andrew mutters without much feeling.

Surprisingly, Neil laughs. “Our lives have been difficult since we were kids. No sense in them getting easier now just because we met.”

Despite himself, Andrew manages a small half smile. Neil is right – the two of them meeting would logically just make their lives twice as difficult. But still, how the fuck is he supposed to keep Neil safe now that he knows this is what the Moriyamas are fighting for?

“How long do we have?” Neil asks, voice interestingly sober.

Andrew sits up straight again and meets Neil’s gaze. “The original contract was for a week, but my guess is that we have another three days, maybe four if we’re lucky.”

Neil snorts and gets to his feet. “Neither of us are very lucky.”

Andrew has to agree.


End file.
